


We do it, because it's all there is to do.

by mariamegale



Category: Band of Brothers
Genre: Angst, Canon Era, M/M, Mild Angst, Pre-Relationship, War is hell, kind of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-21
Updated: 2020-06-21
Packaged: 2021-03-04 06:47:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,720
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24689371
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mariamegale/pseuds/mariamegale
Summary: Babe doesn’t understand why he keeps doing this.He’s wandering aimlessly through the destroyed streets, old buildings crumbling from bombs, bullets, fire, possibly other things. God knows what they’ve been through so far.A part of him wonders what the place looked like, before the war. Before Hitler decided to have half of Europe for breakfast and force Babe to fly across half the globe in an airplane with no door to stop him from making the rest of it his lunch.He tries not to think about it. Instead, he does what he doesn’t understand, and turns his boots towards the first aid station.
Relationships: Babe Heffron/Eugene Roe
Comments: 6
Kudos: 46
Collections: Heavy Artillery Rolling Remix 2020





	We do it, because it's all there is to do.

Babe doesn’t understand why he keeps doing this.

Easy’s in some nondescript town in Nowhere, Belgium (or is it Holland? Or Germany? He’s too fucking tired to remember. They’ve been in too many places in too short of a time), finally off the line but not off duty, because when the fuck are they.

He’s wandering aimlessly through the destroyed streets, old buildings crumbling from bombs, bullets, fire, possibly other things. God knows what they’ve been through so far. 

A part of him wonders what the place looked like, before the war. Before Hitler decided to have half of Europe for breakfast and force Babe to fly across half the globe in an airplane with no door to stop him from making the rest of it his lunch. 

A memory of something Muck said once flitters through his head, but he pushes it away. How long has it been since a Kraut shelling killed half their mortar squad? Babe doesn’t want to remember. It’s still cold out, though not as cold as those fucking foxholes, so it can’t have been too many weeks.

He tries not to think about it. Instead, he does what he doesn’t understand, and turns his boots towards the first aid station. 

Babe isn’t sure when it started, the magnetic pull in his stomach towards the little tents and houses with the red crosses. Probably before they even had tents or houses — there have been too many days in the field where there hasn’t been any, heavy boots instead running over mud and grass and snow to carry their owners towards desperate cries for a medic.

Maybe that’s it, the connection that keeps pulling him towards the aid stations. The sight of a little red cross on a white background, be it on a truck or a tent or a bag or an armband, invokes a gut reaction in every person in the whole war at this point.

The medics are like a safe little haven for the lot of them. Babe has seen hysterical men calm down at the first glimpse of a helmet with a cross on it, dying soldiers letting out a laugh between their sobs as a pair of knees scrape the ground as the medic reaches him.

He doesn’t wonder if he’ll be one of them, some day soon or far away, bleeding out under a pair of steady hands tying a tourniquet or sprinkling sulfa over a wound that not even Jesus himself could close in time. 

He refuses to think about it.

He does anyway.

Babe wonders, and he doesn’t, and he walks towards the aid station. It’s late, and there’s not a whole lot of activity going on for once, the medics actually having time to care for their patients without the threat of a shilling or enemy fire looming over their head every second. 

Some of them are still wearing their helmets, though, another habit too hard to break after months spent ducking from instant death flying over their heads at every second. 

Not the man Babe’s eyes scan for, though — he finds a head covered in short black hair after a few seconds, a thin, pale neck bent down over equally thin and pale hands rewrapping an injured thigh. 

The soldier the leg belongs to is staring up into the ceiling, smoking a cigarette with shaking fingers, grimacing as his wound is prodded and cleaned and wrapped back up. Doc Roe is doing his best, and he really is one of the best, but they don’t have the luxury of anaesthetic or numbing the pain. Not for men with injuries light enough to grit their teeth through it, at least. The morphine is saved for the screamers or the almost-dying. 

Doc’s fingers are gentle, though, even as they firmly press clean gauze into the wound, rubbing carefully to stimulate some granulation tissue to come through. It really can’t be that bad, if it’s not stitched up. Or, maybe, it’s instead too bad to close. 

“ _Some wounds need to breathe and drain_ ,” Babe remembers having it explained to him once when he’d asked Roe about it. “ _They get too dirty, or infected, closing it up would only trap the bacteria._ ”

Exactly when he’d started to learn so much about field medicine is another thing Babe doesn’t have a good answer for. 

He doesn’t know what he’s doing, why he keeps doing this, keeps seeking Eugene Roe out when he’s working, when he’s too busy to pay attention to anything but injured men and their always-depleting supplies.

Once again he finds himself in the opening to the first aid tent, though, Doc Spina the only one to send Babe a questioning look where he’s moving from one man to another. Babe gives him a nod, and Spina returns it, eyebrows frowned in a way that might be confused, might be disapproving, might just be resigned. 

Babe can’t tell. He also doesn’t care, just drags his eyes back to Doc Roe, watches him work with narrowed-down, single-minded focus. 

To Roe, it doesn’t seem to matter whether they’re on the frontline or not. He always approaches his job with the same intense energy, works just as quickly, with precision and hurry and care like every scratch is a bullet wound to the neck and every bandage is the difference between life and death. 

It’s making dual feelings of calm and stomach-churning settle deep in Babe’s abdomen, the vision of this man running across town streets and foxhole fields and spartan hospitals like lives are constantly on the line. Which they are, he guesses, if a medic is called for. 

Roe finishes his work up, shoots his patient a tired smile, says something that’s probably assuring before standing up and scanning the area for the next emergency. But instead, his eyes find Babe’s.

They stare at each other for a few seconds, Roe’s eyes focused, Babe’s probably somewhere in-between tired and calm. Then, the Doc is making his way over and Babe is pulling his helmet off, feeling like he used to when he showed up in Sunday shoes to his classmates’ birthday parties and they all had on more play-friendly things. 

“Heffron,” Eugene says when he gets to Babe, “you okay?”

“Yeah, Doc, everything’s good,” Babe responds, not that it stops the man from dragging his eyes over Babe’s limbs like he’s looking for… Something. _A work habit?_ Maybe. He doubts it’s personal. “Just… Wanted to check in on you.”

“Oh. We’re doing pretty good.” Doc looks back over the tent, where everything really does seem to be calm at the moment. “Not like… You know.”

“Yeah,” Babe says, at the same time that Spina lifts his head from where he’s checking up on some poor man with one arm in a sling.

“I’ve got this, Gene, if you wanna take a break.”

Eugene looks back at his fellow medic, having one of those silent conversations Babe doesn’t understand. He doesn’t know if it’s a medic thing, or a Roe thing, or a Spina thing, or a Roe-and-Spina thing, this ability they have to understand each other with a long look and some eyebrow movements, but Babe stopped questioning it a while back.

That, he does know the exact moment of. It was after Julian— After— When Babe was nestled in between them in a freezing foxhole, eating chocolate with a mouth too cold to make it melt on his tongue. They’d gotten him through the night, helped him fall asleep to wake up to the first night of almost-good rest he’d had in weeks.

Maybe it’s a Bastogne thing.

Either way, Eugene nods after a few moments of not-talking to Spina, and rubs his nose as he heads out of the tent. Babe falls into step next to him, not talking as they walk through the ruined streets of… Wherever this is, again.

They don’t talk, and Babe isn’t sure who’s guiding them as they make their way through the rubble to a spot between two piles of bricks that feels quiet enough. Enough for what, he’s again not sure.

Eugene sits down on a lone chair, because why wouldn’t there be a chair in this place, and lights a cigarette with tired movements. Babe takes a seat on a bit of rubble opposite him, and quietly watches Roe smoke for a few moments. 

“You doing okay?” Babe eventually asks, not caring that he’s supposed to already have gotten an answer ten minutes ago. Eugene sighs the sigh of a man who’s tired of this fucking war, and aren’t they all.

“Yeah. Or no, I don’t know.”

“You doing okay with not being okay?”

“I think so.”

Then they’re quiet again, Eugene handing over his half-smoked cigarette between two long, thin fingers. Babe takes it, lets their hands brush, because he always does. 

Add to the list of things Babe doesn’t know: What to say in these moments.

These moments, when he steals Eugene away from his work to share a few cigarettes and brush fingers and try to not think about how this might be the last time, or how they both look more and more tired for every day that passes. How Eugene’s shoulders are slowly becoming permanently hunched and Babe’s face wrinkles more from frowning than grinning, how the air seems to leave both of them the second they sit down somewhere.

He takes another drag of Gene’s cigarette and doesn’t think about it. About how pathetically insufficient it all, this, he, is, but how it’s somehow also the only thing keeping him going at times anyway.

“You doing okay, Heffron?” Eugene asks quietly, and Babe shrugs in response.

“As well as a man can, when people refuse to use his name,” he responds, just to see Eugene huff out a breath and pull the corners of his lips up in not-a-smile. Babe jumps at the chance to grin back at him anyway. “I don’t get why you insist on that bullshit, Gene.”

“Just following protocol, Edward,” Gene says, looking to the side with what nonetheless feels like a more relaxed curve of his brow. 

“I think we’re a bit past protocol, Doc,” Babe says around the cigarette.

He doesn’t know why he does it. Eugene’s eyes go back to him instantly, and Babe knows he’s done it now, disrupted the very carefully crafted status quo the two of them have tried to uphold for… However long it’s been. 

But Babe is fucking exhausted. He’s tired, of this fucking war and these fucking cities and the fear and the hope and the frantic running from moment to moment, desperately trying to find a spot between two piles of rubble to share a cigarette with a man with too thin of a chest and too-dark circles under his eyes.

He’s tired of having to chase it, chase Eugene, hoping that they’ll get one more moment, one more touch, one more _anything_ before the place goes to shit again. Of chasing weights off Eugene’s back, of hoping Doc Roe will be there to chase Babe’s away. 

Babe’s tired of trying to find time to watch Roe work, hands flitting over skin and tearing packets of sulfa and trying bandages and twisting tourniquets. He’s started to have visceral reactions to the call for a medic like he was one himself, not sure if he’s praying to hear a pair of paratrooper boots sprinting across the battlefield or praying they stay the fuck put just this once. 

The thought of what’ll happen after the war haunts him, if they both even live to see it, if it ever even comes. If this is it, or if there’ll be a chance for something, anything, a space for them after they stop being Doc Roe and Private Heffron.

Fuck that, actually, Babe wonders if there was ever going to be a space for them in any timeline, or if this was always going to be it. If freezing foxholes and stale cigarettes and tired glances were always the only things they would ever share, if Babe’s lot in every life was to just shittily try to keep Eugene Roe from working himself to death — even though Gene is literally out here saving lives and all Babe does is to try and take them, as long as they’re on the other side of the line.

So he puts it, them, to its head, takes one last drag and throws the cigarette away before leaning forward with his elbows on his knees and putting his head in his hands. He rubs his fingers into the hollow of his eyes, feeling drained and exhausted and done with the lot of this bullshit. “Aren’t we?”

There’s no reply, just silence, and then the sound of boots crunching against the filthy street. It sounds like Eugene is leaving, and because Babe is a weak man, he doesn’t have the energy to watch him go. He bends his neck, fisting his hands in his own dirty hair with an emotion he doesn’t explore.

For all the things Babe doesn’t understand, or has no energy for, the nature of his own feelings is the biggest one. So he presses all of it down again, the tiredness and the why’s and the what-if’s and the fear and the hope and the loneliness and the safety. He’s in the middle of a war on an unfamiliar continent. There’s no time for this.

But then the sound of someone turning on their heels gets to him, and Babe feels his stomach drop because Eugene walks back like he’s angry, and fucking hell please, no—

A pair of firm fingers on his chin forces Babe to tilt his head back up, and he sees Eugene squatting down in front of him with a face that speaks of non-negotiability. Babe steels himself for whatever is coming his way, be it a fist or a hiss or just furious staring, but instead he gets a hand on the back of his neck and then he’s pulled into what’s simultaneously the worst and best kiss he’s ever had.

It’s more like an angry press of lips than a kiss, and it’s over in two seconds, but it makes all the air go out of him anyway. All that Babe has time to notice is that Eugene’s mouth is very soft, despite the hard appearance of… All of him, really, and then it’s gone, and they’re left looking at each other again.

Babe is staring while Eugene is glaring at him, because Gene can’t do anything that isn’t furiously intense, clearly. Babe sees his mouth open, slightly, like he wants to say something, but of course then the moment is over.

_“Medic!”_ Echoes an urgently desperate cry between the house walls, and both Babe and Eugene’s heads shoot up instantly. The hand on Babe’s neck pulls away and then Doc Roe is off, not shooting so much as a look over his shoulder as he half-runs, half-jumps over the rubble to get to whoever it is that needs him.

They’re not even on the front lines.

It doesn’t matter, because of course it doesn’t. 

This war doesn’t care about Eugene Roe, or Babe Heffron, or the Krauts, or whoever it is that needs saving right now. 

So Roe goes, bag in hand, still not wearing a helmet, running as fast as he can to get to it. Babe wonders if he’ll get there in time, if he’ll be able to help. He wonders if the vision of Doc’s dirt-smeared armband, his smooth voice and steady hands are once again going to become the last bit of comfort someone knows.

Babe pulls his own helmet back on, picks up his gun and lifts himself up from the ruins of the house he’s been sitting on. The war doesn’t care about them, and they have no room to care about anything but the war. 

So he doesn’t think about it, about the touches and the moments and the cigarettes and the—

He doesn’t think about it.

Climbing back out of yet another quiet spot, back into the screaming and the panic and the death and the victory, Babe slowly returns to his post. He doesn’t understand why, but he does it anyway, because it’s all there is to do. 

**Author's Note:**

> ROLLING REMIX 2020 IS DONE! wooOOOOO
> 
> I'm really out here about to write an award speech, but I just wanna thank the mods (Tec, specifically) for organising this and devoting so much time and energy to making the RR happen. You're worth your weight in gold, seriously, go take a shower to get some water weight in there too because you deserve it all <3
> 
> Also, massive thanks to my wonderful "prompter" (idk which word to uuuuuuuuse) whom I can't thank properly until the 26th, but by golly prepare for a long comment then bc you deserve it :)))))) you inspired me greatly and I adore it. (And you).
> 
> this has been funnnnn i hope you all enjoyed it too, whether you're a writer or a reader or fall in any other category <3 <3 <3 lov's y'all


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